Nielsen: No website has been able to successfully recover from a loss of popularity.
 

i was reading this article on myspace on its recovery attempt and saw the quote from Jon Gibs, vice president of media analytics for Nielsen Online, a research firm, and thought it was strange that they would take such an absolutest position

The problem isn't necessarily with MySpace as much as it is with the nature of online social network users today, said Jon Gibs, vice president of media analytics for Nielsen Online, a research firm.

Web users are fickle, he said.

"It seems that social networks are incredibly portable, meaning that me and my friends can go from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter without blinking much," he said.

History proves this point, he said, adding that no site has been able to successfully recover from a substantial loss of popularity.

myspace is dead, pass over it

Interesting. I never thought of that before but I guess it's true. Brick and mortar companies recover all the time, but I can't remember an on-line business that fell out favor and came back.

myspace is -> [timeline pic]

Yeah, remember the 23 year old kid from Boulder? He built and sold BlueMountainArts.com to Excite for $970,000,000.

It was an online greating card company that collected 13 million email addresses on Valantine's day, 1999 or 2000. No revenue... No value today.

He went on to build ProFlowers.com, and sold that for $500M when he was like 29.

But, once BlueMountain lost it's wave... It was gone.

I'm glad we haven't peaked.

myspace is far from dead it may not be #1 but its still far from dead

you know that seems true. interesting.

duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

"web users are fickle" - jesus fuck, I wonder how much captain obvious Mr Gibs gets paid to come up with Internet 101 gems like that.

Who the fuck would listen to anything Leslie Nielsen has to say

Wrong Nielsen, it's about Jakob Nielsen more likely - http://www.useit.com/

This seems like the case. It's hard to think of any website that has made a comeback.

<-- Trying to think of at least one that returned to favor?

I guess he dont care much after he sold it:1orglaugh

Once a site is bought by a big conglomerate it goes to shit.

Wow, never heard of that before. That's pretty slick :1orglaugh:thumbsup

Wow, interesting read! Did you know bluemountain sold again in 2001 for a "measle" 35 million? That's a drop from almost a BILLION dollars to 35 million. Ouch!

Can you imagine selling hookup.com for a billion, or even half a billion?

:)

I really can't think of anything that has made a comeback....

These experts have a lot of opinion to fill up the internet with theories and words.

The problem is, the internet has been around for a very short time period compared to how much it has evolved over the years. The rules are constantly changing. Social networks have been around for even a shorter time period where we can't accurately draw conclusions.

I am not saying myspace will not be a thing of the past. Everything has its "prime time". New stars are born every year. The old stars who can shine with new ideas, will jump back into the race.

Now the real problem is this, those people who create the original idea and get it big have the only real vision behind it. This vision ends with the sale of the project. Once the project is sold, passion and vision are no longer a part of the project and it becomes another black and white operation of a corporate.

Once things become on a corporate level, it becomes stale and boring. It becomes at that point to be only about money. People start to feel this both on a conscious and subconscious level. Project = fail.

True....

I have to wonder if those deals were genuine or a case of mainstream payoff/fraud/shenanigans of some kind. The level of stupidity just seems so incomprehensible.

with all of the money that most of the websites make when they sell their product to a bigger company... why would anyone be worried about whether or not a particular website makes a comeback or not? That is not really the point of the popularity of most of these websites anyways... it's the technology that drives the sales of these companys for outrageous amounts of money.

Netscape went away.. but we still have Firefox.... right?
DG

ummm maybe you missed this post

seeandsee has confirmed it !!!!!

I am still waiting for altavista.com to recover.

On a side note, Microsoft's Live Search is trying to make a comeback with Bing's """""decision engine""""".

I can gauran-fucking-tee you that if Napster wasn't sued into oblivion... it would of gone right back to being the worlds best source for mp3's ever.... the RIAA knew it and made sure they had their shit together when they went after him. :2 cents:

what does that do to somebody who is trying to revive their site/program when you know that virtually nobody was able to recover and reestablish themselves after they lost favor, at least on a large scale

I think the point is the biggest sites used to be Myspace, Ebay, and YouTube.

Myspace seems to have been replaced with Facebook, and instead of using Ebay I tend to shop on Amazon.com.

god damn, thats insane

ah no
msn.com

remember when it first started it was a doorway to microsoft network that competed with aol close network
netscape made the open internet the superior choice to those types of close networks
causing a decline in that site
it got retooled as a search engine
and got bigger again (they made it the home page of their browser)
google came along and took that market share cause another dip
but they have been rebuilding it as a nexus of services clustered around a search engine.
and by improving the search engine.

they are bigger then they were before their first fall, we still have to wait and see if they will be bigger after their second fall.

since the web is like 13 years old, its too early to say a name can never return. lets circle back on this in 100 years.

good point, you may want to tell jon